Dostoevsky (67 page)

The tendency of Marco Vovchok’s work, Dostoevsky declares, is worthy of the highest praise, “and we are ready to rejoice in [her] activity” (18: 92). But it is one thing to approve of her intentions; it is quite another to overlook the glaring artistic deficiencies of her stories, which, in Dostoevsky’s opinion, ruin whatever persuasive power the worthy ideas embodied in them might have exercised. To prove his point, Dostoevsky simply reprints the extracts from the story given by Dobrolyubov himself; he does not think it necessary to argue the case in detail, allowing the stilted sentiments and casebook reactions to speak for themselves. Masha, he comments, is “a tent-show heroine, some sort of bookish creature of the study, not a woman” (18: 90). And if Dobrolyubov thinks that reading “Masha” will cause supporters of serfdom to change their minds, then he is woefully mistaken. How can an author prove that a particular sentiment (for example, a hatred of serfdom) exists among the Russian common people when she lacks the artistic ability to portray characters who resemble Russians at all? The characters of “Masha” are “some sort of supernumeraries out of a ballet dressed up in Russian
caftans
and
sarafans
; they are
paysans
and
paysannes
, not
Russian peasant men and women.” Hence, Dostoevsky informs Dobrolyubov, “artistic form is in the highest degree useful, and useful precisely from
your
point of view” (18: 92–93). For the falsity of “Masha” will only persuade those who already hold a contemptuous opinion of the Russian peasant that, since no alternative image can be convincingly projected, the time-honored one they still cling to must be accurate.

If Dostoevsky had been concerned merely to indict the absurdities of both the partisans of art and the radical Utilitarians, and to establish his own independent position in this literary controversy, then he might have terminated his article after disposing of Marco Vovchok. But he was hunting for bigger game, and his real quarry was Chernyshevsky’s Feuerbachian aesthetics, with its devaluation of the whole realm of the supernatural and the transcendent and its aim of exposing art as a substitute religion. No more than Chernyshevsky could he make his argument in any explicit form; but the drift of his words is unmistakable when placed in this context.

For Chernyshevsky, art was merely a deceptive alternative for the material satisfactions of real life and served as an imaginary surrogate just so long as these satisfactions are withheld. “If a man is obliged to live in the tundras of Siberia . . . ,” Chernyshevsky had written, “he may dream of magic gardens with unearthly trees with coral branches, emerald leaves, and ruby fruit, but on transferring his residence to, say, the Kursk province, and being able to roam to his heart’s content in a modest but tolerable orchard with apple, cherry, and pear trees. . . . The dreamer will forget not only about
The Arabian Nights
but also about the orange groves in Spain.”
⁸
Dostoevsky, however, rejects the notion that art exists only as an imaginary replacement for the lacks of man’s material needs. Man has other needs as well, and, Dostoevsky affirms, “art is for man just as much a need as eating or drinking. The need for beauty, and the creations embodying it, are inseparable from man, and without it man would perhaps have no wish to live. Man thirsts for [beauty] . . . and it is perhaps in this that lies the greatest mystery of artistic creation, that the image of beauty which emerges from its hands immediately becomes an idol
without any conditions
” (18: 94).

It is clear from his use of the word “idol” that Dostoevsky is touching on the relations of art and religion. The images of art have traditionally provided the objects of religious reverence because man has a need to worship something entirely transcending the bounds of human life as he knows it. Man has always displayed an unconditional need for beauty inseparable from his history; without it, as Dostoevsky poignantly suggests, he would perhaps not wish to go on living
at all. The creations of art thus immediately become “idols,” objects of worship, “because the need for beauty develops most strongly when man is in disaccord with reality, in discordance, in struggle, that is
when he lives most fully
, for the moment at which man lives most fully is when he is seeking something, . . . it is then that he displays the most natural desire for everything that is harmonious and serene, and in beauty there is harmony and serenity” (18: 94). For Dostoevsky, as well as for Chernyshevsky, this quest is the result of a lack in the real world of human struggle and deprivation; but there can be no question for Dostoevsky of bridging the gap between the real and the ideal merely by material means. Since man “lives most fully” in Dostoevsky’s universe only when he is in
disaccord
with reality, it is evident that the novelist’s vision of what is ultimately important in human life totally differs from that of Chernyshevsky.

Indeed, the idea that man could ever attain total contentment with his life on earth is linked by Dostoevsky with images of the death of the spirit and of moral decadence. At such moments, Dostoevsky writes, “it is as if life slowed down, and we have even seen examples of how man, having attained the ideal of his desires, not knowing what to strive for any longer, satisfied to the gills, fell into some kind of melancholy, even provoking such melancholy in himself; how he sought for another ideal in his life, and, satiated beyond measure, not only failed to value what he enjoyed but even consciously diverged from the proper path, stimulating in himself tastes that were eccentric, unhealthy, stinging, discordant, sometimes monstrous, losing the feel for, and the aesthetic sense of, healthy beauty and demanding the exceptional in its stead.” To adopt, as an ideal for mankind, the aim of the fullest material satisfaction is thus the equivalent of encouraging moral perversity and corruption. For this reason, a genuine “beauty” embodying the “eternal ideals” of mankind—ideals of harmony and serenity far transcending the human realm—is “an indispensable exigence of the human organism” (18: 94). Only such ideals, which man continually struggles to attain and to realize in his own existence, can prevent him from sinking into apathy and despair.

This conception of beauty as some form of transcendent expression of mankind’s eternal ideals provides Dostoevsky with a vantage point from which to combat the narrow definition of “usefulness” in Utilitarian aesthetics. For if art is entrusted with the task of expressing mankind’s eternal ideals, then to prescribe a particular role for it in terms of “utility” implies that one knows in advance the outcome of the entire historical destiny of the human race. But such knowledge, of course, is outside the human ken: “How, indeed, can one determine clearly and independently exactly what must be done to arrive at the ideal of all our desires, to achieve everything that humanity wishes and toward which it aspires?” Since we cannot do this, “how [can we] determine in full certainty what is harmful and useful”; indeed, we cannot even tell how, and in what degree, art has been “useful” to humanity in the past.

Who would have predicted, for example, that the works of two “old fogies” such as Corneille and Racine could play “a decisive and unexpected part in the circumstances of the historical life of a whole people” (that is, during the French Revolution) (18: 78)? The manifold ways in which art interacts with society are impossible to foresee; works that seem to have no direct social relevance at all may well, under certain circumstances, exercise the most powerful and direct influence on the life of action. But if we are not able to understand exactly how this comes about, “it is very possible that we also delude ourselves too when we strictly and imperatively dictate mankind’s occupations and show art the normal path of its usefulness and its genuine mission.” The Utilitarians wish to limit art to the social needs of the present, and regard any concern with the past—such as an admiration for
The Iliad
—as shameful escapism, a retreat into self-indulgent enjoyment and idle dilettantism. Dostoevsky recognizes the moral concern motivating such an erroneous position, and says that “this is why we feel so much sympathy for them [the radicals] and wish them to be respected” (18: 95–96).

In any case, since Russian culture has now become part of European civilization as a whole, it is only natural for Russian writers to draw freely on the common treasures of “the historical and universally human” (18: 99). Moreover, a contemporary writer can use the past to express the most burning issues of the present—a point Dostoevsky illustrates with a brilliant analysis of the poem “Diana,” written by the bête noire of the radical critics, the lyricist A. A. Fet. This finely chiseled little work, quite Parnassian in feeling, describes a moment of disappointed expectation: the poet suddenly imagines that a statue of the goddess Diana will come to life and descend from her pedestal to walk through the streets of Rome. But, alas! “the motionless marble / whitely gleamed before me with unfathomable beauty” (18: 97).

Dostoevsky interprets the poem, especially these last two lines, as “a passionate appeal, a prayer before the perfection of past beauty, and a hidden inner nostalgia for that same perfection which the soul is seeking, but which it must long continue to seek, while long continuing to be tormented with birth-pangs before it is found” (18: 97). The “hidden inner nostalgia” that Dostoevsky discerns in this text is surely a longing for a new theogony, a new apparition of the sacred that would come to replace the beautiful, though lifeless, pagan idol; it is a longing for the birth of Christ, for the God-man who was indeed one day to walk on earth and supplant the immobile and distant Roman goddess. And since Dostoevsky has described his own time as one of “striving, struggle, uncertainty, and faith (because our time is a time of faith),” he interprets Fet’s poem as expressing the most urgent of contemporary themes.
⁹

These reflections on art conclude with a single sentence that, Dostoevsky believes, resolves the conflict between the two entrenched misunderstandings, and which he prints as an independent paragraph in italics: “
Art is always actual and real; has never existed in any other way, and, most important, cannot exist in any other way
” (18: 98). This idea was first expressed in Russian criticism by Valerian Maikov, Dostoevsky’s close friend in the 1840s; and he now reiterates it as the cornerstone of his own doctrine. If it sometimes seems that art deviates from reality and is not “useful,” this is only because we do not yet know all the ways through which art serves mankind and because we are, even if for the most laudable reasons, too narrowly focused on the immediate and the common good. Of course, artists themselves sometimes stray from the proper path, and in such cases the efforts of Dobrolyubov and his brethren to call them to order are quite legitimate. But Dostoevsky makes a sharp distinction between criticism, admonition, exhortation, persuasion, and the issuance of what are in effect dictates and
ukazy
as to how artists should create.

All such efforts to regiment art are in any case doomed to futility; no true artist will obey them, and art will go its own way regardless of attempts to bridle its creative caprices. Such attempts are based on a total misunderstanding of the nature of art, which always has responded to, and has never separated itself from, the needs and interests of humankind. Dostoevsky thus defends the liberty of art not because he rejects the criterion of “utility,” but precisely with the certainty that the freer art will be in its development, the more useful it will be to the interests of humanity” (18: 102). Once again he takes up a totally original position, arguing both for the liberty and the utility of art, but—most important of all—defining such “utility” in terms of man’s eternal striving to incorporate within his life the inspiration of a supernatural religious ideal.

This crucial aspect of Dostoevsky’s argument is of fundamental importance for an understanding of his own evolving view of life. It is significant, for example, that the instances of sane and healthy “beauty” he refers to—
The Iliad
, the
Apollo of Belvedere
, the poem of Fet—all have religious connotations, if only pagan ones, and he even goes out of his way to stress this point. “This marble is a god,” he says, speaking of the
Apollo
, “and spit at it as much as you like, you will not rob it of its divinity” (18: 78).
¹⁰
Even though Dostoevsky limits himself to examples from classical antiquity, this line of reasoning could easily culminate in an affirmation of the importance of “Christianity in art.” Shortly after leaving prison camp in 1854, Dostoevsky had written that nothing in the world was “more beautiful” than the figure of Christ;
¹¹
and it was this beauty that provided moral inspiration for the modern world, just as the gods of Greek and Roman mythology had done for antiquity. Perhaps for reasons of ideological strategy, he deliberately underplays this Christian aspect of his argument and takes refuge in the Greco-Roman past; but it was not from the religion of the Greeks and Romans that Dostoevsky expected any answer to the anguishing questions confronting both modern Russia and modern man.